Neighborhood attractions like this Fort Greene green market are seen as signs of gentrification — which the Times recently blamed for a local family's poverty. Rich Press

Among the villains in this week’s endless New York Times series on 10-year old Dasani, who lives with her methadone-dependent parents and seven siblings in a decrepit shelter for homeless families, is gentrification. How’s that?

Part 3 of the series, which is classic Pulitzer-bait, contrasts the depressing Auburn Family Residence (where Dasani’s family lives) with the area of Fort Greene a few blocks away, where townhouses sell for millions and high-end wine-tastings are held across the street from a 99¢ store.

Ironies abound. Dasani’s mother remembers seeing two white people cross-country skiing through Bed-Stuy, and this image serves as an ominous portent of her cracked future. The new residents are described as fearful, profligate morons: alternately “grabbing” their children when Dasani walks by and buying expensive blood orange donuts.

“Gentrification,” writes Andrea Elliott, “has become shorthand for an urban neighborhood where muggings are down and espresso is roasted — a place that has been ‘discovered,’ as though no one had been living there.”

Of course, Elliott doesn’t ask any of the gentrifiers if they actually feel that they “discovered” Fort Greene. Nor does she explain how gentrification is relevant to the poverty of the family she is profiling.

Dasani’s parents are described as completely dysfunctional — even Dasani recognizes this — and basically unable even to look for work. They haven’t been priced out of the neighborhood, because they have no income anyway.

Actually, Elliott insists that there is no reason for them to work, because, “even with two full-time jobs, on minimum wage, they would have combined salaries of only $2,300 per month — just enough to cover the average rent for a studio in Brooklyn.”

It is odd, in an article that cites a source for practically every detail, that the $2,300 “average rent for a studio in Brooklyn” is dropped without backup. It’s wildly wrong.

In reality, that figure is around the average rent for all apartments in Brooklyn, including very high-end luxury rentals.

It is frankly unbelievable that the Times could have printed that figure as though it had any bearing on lived reality, either that of Dasani’s family or of anyone who knows the slightest thing about East Brooklyn.

Scan any real-estate listing for Brownsville, Flatlands or Bed-Stuy and you’ll find plenty of two or three-bedroom apartments that rent for far less than $2,300.

Anyway, what difference does it make for Dasani’s family what the “average” rent is in Brooklyn? If her parents did in fact earn $2,300 working at the minimum wage, they’d surely still get supplemental assistance for food and health care, and they could house their seven children in far less cramped and disgusting quarters.

The problem with talking about “gentrification” as though it were a social problem that destroys neighborhoods is that people generally move to the most expensive area they can afford. When you move into a poor neighborhood with lower rents, it’s because your were already priced out of somewhere else: It is not a scheme to dispossess anyone, or an exercise in slumming.

Everyone in New York faces high rents, and moves to where they can afford to live. In this sense all housing is affordable housing, for whoever can afford to live there.

But there is another wrinkle to the gentrification debate. Who gentrifies? Everyone knows and celebrates the diverse fabric of New York and its changing neighborhoods. But gentrification as a term of art means only one thing: the movement of white people into minority neighborhoods.

No one worries about the movement of black professionals into Harlem: That is reclaiming the glory days of Sugar Hill and Striver’s Row. No one calls it gentrification when Chinese immigrants establish themselves in Sunset Park and along Avenue U in Brooklyn: It is just the natural turnover of New York neighborhoods as waves of newcomers succeed each other.

Certainly New York has a housing crisis. It’s a shame when people have to leave the neighborhoods they grew up in because they can’t afford to live there. The middle class has been squeezed here as it has everywhere, and stagnant wage growth has capped or truncated many people’s aspirations.

The circumstances of Dasani’s life are wretched, without a doubt. But the Times hasn’t shown us that rising rents in Fort Greene have anything to do with it.

Seth Barron runs City Council Watch, an investigative Web site focusing on local New York City politics.